Undead and Unappreciated (10 page)

T
he devil's own—Laura Goodman, college girl about Dinkytown—breezed into Dunn Brothers at two minutes after five. She waved at me, paused to speak to the counter guy—who was slavering like a beast, I couldn't help noticing—and then came over to me.

“I'm so sorry I'm late,” she gasped by way of greeting, shaking my hand again. “I'm really, really sorry. Have you been waiting long? I'm sorry.”

“It's fine, Laura. By my watch you're right on time.” She seemed so contrite, so sincere, I found myself rushing to reassure her. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks. My cocoa's coming.”

“Don't like the hard stuff, huh?” I asked, indicating my own doublechocolattespressowithextrafoam.

“Oh, I try not to drink caffeine after lunchtime,” she replied. “I have to get up early in the morning for work.”

“You've got a job, too?”

“Too? Oh, that's right.” She smiled at me. It wasn't a grin, it wasn't a smirk, she didn't raise an eyebrow knowingly. It was just a nice smile. “You were following me half the night yesterday.”

“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “I guess it's no good pretending I wasn't.”

“My father says liars are fated to believe their own lies, so it's probably good you're coming clean.”

“Yeah…your father. Uh, listen about that…”

She leaned forward and took my hand in hers, then dropped it. “Gosh, your hand is cold! You should have another hot drink.”

“Sorry. I have bad circulation.”

“No,
I'm
sorry. I hope I didn't make you feel bad. I shouldn't have just blurted it out like that.”

“Don't worry about it, Laura.” She was too good to be true! Minnesota nice was one thing, but Laura was in a class by herself. “Listen…”

She leaned forward, perfect gorgeous face lighting up. “This is about my family, isn't it? My birth family.” She paused, then added, “Sorry about interrupting.”

I blinked in surprise. “How'd you know?”

“Well.” The counter guy brought her a white coffee cup the size of my head, absolutely brimming with whipped cream and swirled with chocolate syrup. She smiled up at him and cupped the biggest cocoa in the world in her hands. “I was thinking about you last night, after you left. And you're tall, like me—in fact you're about an inch taller. My whole life, I've never met a woman taller than me. And you're blond, and we both have light-colored eyes…and you were so mysterious, but so nice…it just got me thinking.”

“Oh, so you know you're—that you were adopted?”

“Yes, of course. Mama and Dad told me all about it, about how of all the babies in the world, they chose me.” She was still smiling, clearly happy at the memory. “God brought me to them.”

“Right.” God. Uh-huh. “Well, I recently—like, this week—found out about you, and I did some detective work.” With vampires. And a certain dark book bound in human skin. No,
not
chemistry. “And I tracked you down and—I don't know.” I really
didn't
know where I was going with this. “I just wanted to meet you and then I guess…”

“You're my sister, right?”

“Half sister,” I hastened to correct. I did not have a single drop of blood in common with the Ant
or
the devil. Biologically, Laura was the Ant's own blood daughter, but without the interference of Satan, she never would have been born. It was enough to make me want to lunge for the Advil. “We have the same father.”
And I'm so, so sorry about that, Laura.

“Well, I'm just so pleased to meet you!” Impulsively, she leaned over further and flung her arms around my neck. I almost broke her arms before I realized she was hugging me, not attacking me. “I really, really am,” she gushed. She was so close I could smell—vanilla? I'd smelled it before, natch, but being in a coffee shop, I'd assumed…

“Well, thanks,” I said, gently extricating myself. “It's nice to meet you, too. Has anyone ever told you, you smell like cookies?”

“I use vanilla extract instead of perfume. It's cheap, and they don't test it on bunnies,” she told me soberly.

“Huh. That's kind of clever, actually.”

“People tell me that a lot.” She sipped her cocoa and continued, oblivious of her whipped cream mustache. “I'm at the U on scholarship. Hmm, what else should I tell you? What do you want to know?”

“What are your folks like?”

She wiped the cream away with the back of her hand, then wiped her hand on the napkin. “They're wonderful. Dad is the minister at the Presbyterian church in Inver Grove—”

“Your dad's a
minister
?” I tried to dial back my total amazement and shock. I thought the
devil
was supposed to be in the details. “That's—really cool.”

“Uh-huh. And Mama takes care of the house, and me. She's in school now, too! Now that I'm out of the house, she thought it would be a good time to finish up her nursing degree. We're students together at the U! Oh, you have to come over! They would love to meet you.”

“That would be”—extremely weird; incredibly uncomfortable; horribly inconvenient right now—“great.”

“What about you, Betsy? What do you do?”

As God was my witness, I had no idea what to say. I just couldn't blurt it all out to her. She was such a sweetheart, I didn't want to wreck her evening. Day. Month. Life. I resolved to take it one step at a time. “I'm—I run the—a—nightclub. A bar, actually. It's called Scratch, and I own it.”

“You
own
it?”

“Well, it was left to me. By someone—” Who I staked. “Anyway, that's really my thing. I mean, that's what I do.” That didn't sound suspicious, right?

“I'd love to see it sometime.”

“Well, maybe I'll bring you by.” Ha! The devil's daughter, checking out my undead nightclub. “You seem to be—I mean, you seem kind of together about all this.”

I had to admit, this was so not what I expected. I expected threats, mustache-twirling death threats. Not a pleasant coffee in Dinkytown. The Book had warned me about her but hadn't mentioned what an innocent she'd be.

“Mama and Dad were very open about my background,” she was explaining.

Not that open, honey.
“Yeah?”

“And now that I'm out of the house, I was going to do some detective work of my own. I love Mama and Dad—of course!—but I was curious, you know? I had a lot of questions, but I didn't want to be disrespectful.”

“Sure, I can totally get behind that.”

She smiled at me gratefully. “Anyway, you just saved me a whole lot of work.” She seemed so nice, so grateful, that I couldn't help returning her smile.

“It's just so nice to meet you.”

“It's nice to meet you, too.”

“I've always hoped for a sister.”

“Actually, me, too. My folks split up when I was a kid—”

“I'm really sorry.”

“Thanks. Anyway, I was pretty lonesome, and if it wasn't for my friend Jess, I don't know what—” Talking about Jessica made me feel like choking up. How could I tell Laura the truth…about anything? About what I was, how I'd been such an asshole, how she was supposed to be an asshole, too, and by the way, please don't take over the world. “We're kind of in a fight right now,” I finished lamely.

“If I can ask…Betsy, I hope you're not offended…”

“Go ahead. I've butted into your life.”

“Well…when your folks split up…was it because of me?”

“Oh no no no,” I assured her. Then, “Well, maybe. A little. It wasn't your
fault
. I mean, you were just a fetus. But I guess when my mom had proof my dad was cheating…things sort of went downhill.”

“Oh.” She looked down at her lap. “I guess I don't really know how to feel about that. I'm sorry my birth father was faithless, but if he hadn't been…”

“Don't beat yourself up,” I advised, in big sister mode. “Trust me, you'll screw up in your life enough without taking the blame for something that isn't your fault.”

She looked up from her hands and smiled again. “I really—oh golly, who is
that
?”

I looked. Eric Sinclair, walking in…but not to order coffee, I bet. I realized the sun had fallen down while Laura and I were chatting.

“That's my—” I took another look at Laura's perfect beauty, the way she was goggling at Eric, remembered (like I could forget) his recent disinterest in me, and said it. “My boyfriend.” Except that wasn't right, either. According to the Book, he was my consort, my husband, my king. I'd always felt just the opposite, that he wasn't anything to me—just another vampire in a city full of the darn things.

“He's your
boyfriend?
”

“Yep, that's my steady sweetie.” I was digging myself quite the hole with my big fat mouth. But no matter how nice Laura was, I did not want the devil's daughter to know the king of the vampires was available. And vice versa.

“Elizabeth.” Suddenly, Eric was right
there
, standing beside our little table by the window. I jumped and nearly threw my coffee into the window. He was holding a large foam cup with a straw sticking out of the cover, a cup that smelled like strawberries. The man was a nut for his smoothies.

“Hi, Sin—Eric. Ah, Eric, this is my sister, Laura. Laura, this is…”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Eric,” I finally said. That wasn't a horrible weird awkward pause, was it?

“Charmed,” he said.

“Hiya,” she replied, dazzled. She shook his hand and gasped again. “Boy, you both have freezing cold hands! I guess you two are a pretty good match.”

“Right!” I said. “That's what made us perfect for each other: clammy extremities. Laura and I were just catching up with each other.”

“Pull up a chair,” she invited. “Have you been dating long?”

Sinclair lifted the other eyebrow at “dating.” I couldn't blame him. We had done quite a few things together, none of which could be classified as a date. “Six months,” he said, sitting down. Then he paused, and added, “You smell like sugar cookies.”

“She uses vanilla extract for perfume,” I explained. “It's better for our animal friends,”

“Oh, yes, our animal friends.” He barely seemed to notice my explanation. “My, my, Laura Goodman. I must say, that is a charming name for a charming young lady.”

“Eric's old,” I broke in. “Really really old.”

“Er—really?” Laura asked. “Gosh, you don't look even out of your thirties.”

“Tons of face-lifts. He's a surgical addict. I'm trying to get him help,” I added defensively when they both gave me strange looks.

“I was just telling Betsy that my parents would love to meet her, and you must come, too.”

“I would be delighted, Laura.”

“Yeah,” I said, watching the two of them stare at each other over foam cups. “That'd be swell.”

“I
'm so sorry to bother you with this.” It was the third time Alice had said it. “But I thought you ought to know.”

“It's okay, Alice. It's not your fault. They're not animals, they're people. It's stupid to pretend they don't have human brains. I should have figured that out a long time before now.”

“It's not your fault, Majesty. The fault lies with me. It's—”

“They should be recaptured and staked,” Sinclair said, sounding bored.

“We've been over this,” I snapped back.

“I suppose we have.”

I didn't agree with his kill-all-Fiends mind-set, but his boredom with the subject wasn't much fun, either.

“It's not ‘they,'” Alice supplied helpfully. “It's just one.”

“Let me guess: George?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Swell.” The perfect end to a perfect night. The devil's daughter turned out to be sweet as cream, Sinclair gave off the distinct impression that he'd like to sample some of that cream, I was in hell, and George had gone on the lam again. “Just great.”

“We'll find him again, ma'am.”

“Okay, well, call me if he turns up.”

“At once, Majesty.”

“We'll keep our eyes peeled, not literally. Meanwhile, let's think of a better system to keep him. The others don't seem to want to get out, but George does, so let's figure out why and fix it so he can have what he wants here on the property. It's not the best plan in the world, but it's what we'll start with.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Swell,” Sinclair said, and gave me a thin smile.

 

“What the hell are you doing following me around?” I griped. We'd driven back to the mansion in our cars, and I was bitching Eric out on the front lawn. “Like dealing with the spawn of Satan isn't touchy enough without you popping up like a jack-in-the-box with fangs.”

“I wasn't following you,” he pointed out coolly. “I was following her.”

Nuts. I'd been afraid of that. “Why?”

“She is a fascinating creature. I had no sense of deceit from her, did you?”

“N—”

“All that potential power, that world-building power, wrapped up in a lovely package. A genuinely nice girl with no clue of the unholy power she could wield.” He was practically rubbing his hands together. “To harness that power…if I could just—”

“We,” I said. “If
we
could just.”

“Yes, yes. Really, an engaging dilemma.”

“That's just super,” I said, managing to keep the acid bitterness out of my tone. Pretty much. “Look, one thing at a time. We've got to make nice with Jessica and find George.”

“As you have made clear in the past,” he reminded me, “those are your problems, not mine.”

For a second I couldn't say anything; it felt like cold dread just—just grabbed my heart. Six months of pushing him away, and when I succeeded, I was sick about it. Which was sick.

And as upset as I was, I was also mad. Okay, I'd screwed up. He was an eighty-year-old dead guy. Like he'd never made a mistake in all that time?

When I finally found my voice, I went on the attack. Anything was better than feeling like the biggest loser in the world.

“
Listen,
jackass. Do you think you can stop sulking for five fucking minutes and
help me
? Is that too fucking much to ask? If you won't admit you're mad, then you'd better be on board with the dark evil stuff like usual. You can't have it both ways.”

He looked down at me, totally unmoved. “You…would…be…
amazed
at what I can have.” Then he turned away.

I grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him back. “Don't walk away from me, you—”

“Did you hear something?” he asked, shaking free of me with no trouble at all. “There's—” Then he was gone, knocked a good six feet sideways by something.

“Eric!” I called, like every useless movie heroine in the history of cinema. I charged over to grab whatever had tackled him. “Let go!”
And thanks!

I leaned forward to seize whatever by the back of the neck—assuming it had a back of a neck—when suddenly it got off Sinclair and stood.

And stood. And stood. It was tall, even slumped over. Long dirty clots of hair hung in its face, and its clothing—filthy jeans and a T-shirt of no definable color—was in rags. Bare feet. Filthy toes.

“George!” I gasped.

“How completely fabulous,” Sinclair said, getting up off the ground and brushing himself off. There were leaves in his hair, but
I
wasn't going to tell him. “I assume he followed us. Or tracked you.”

“Tracked
me
?”

“They are uncommonly attached to you, in case you've forgotten their devotion when they killed Nostro,” he snorted, as if I
could
forget.

“Aw, shaddup. George, you were very very bad to run away from Alice.” I shook my finger under his nose. It was a little disconcerting the way he followed my finger with his muddy gaze. “Very bad! But you were very good to stomp Sinclair when he was being a dick, so I think we'll call this a wash.”

“What?” Sinclair scowled. “How can you say—”

“Pipe down, ass hat. You know what, George? Let's call Alice and have her come get you. Good, good Fiend!”

“No, no, no,” Sinclair began. At least he was evincing some interest again—interest that didn't threaten the hell out of me.

“And while we're waiting, you can have a shower.”

“Elizabeth, I must protest.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Hate the idea, do you?”

“Completely.”

“Good enough.” I took George's cold, grimy hand, and he followed me.